A Mexicali story about the thought police

Why is it so difficult to please yourself?

The essence of the problem is to make something which is profoundly personal. But to be true — that is, to be truly personal — it must be at the same time personal in an impersonal, eternal sense.

The loss of connection to the I is not only the repression of one person’s ideas, and the repression of a view of the world. It is also repression in the classic psychiatric sense, where a person denies his own feelings, and may even fight frantically to avoid confronting or admitting them.

This contrast between thought and feeling, between the image of architecture as it was supposed to be and the reality of human feelings as they actually are, has been a major theme of these four books. In the theory which I have put forward, the theoretical and factual substance of the world, its structure and its life, are congruent with the feelings we all have. They are not congruent with the image of architecture as it is supposed to be.

(Pages 277-279)